Where to get help

College students and any person — regardless of enrollment, age or address — who suffers a sexual assault or an attempted sexual assault on one of the Five Colleges or in any local community can call the Women and Communities Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s 24-hour a day Rape Crisis Hotline, 545-0800, for support and services.

Office hours for the center are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., located at UMass’ New Africa House on Infirmary Way.

The Women and Communities Center can send a victim advocate to the caller following the attack, day or night. The advocate will go to the police station with the victim to file a report or to the hospital for a medical exam.

Victims can also call Safe Passage, a Northampton-based anti-domestic violence agency. Safe Passage has a domestic violence 24-hour a day crisis hotline at 586-5066.

Experts in preventing campus rape and sexual assault say a concerted effort to educate students about what constitutes consent, as well as drawing bystanders into the mix, is the best prevention campaign a campus can take. “Students don’t understand consent and so they say that someone can ‘accidentally rape someone.’ I hate that term — it shows such a lack …

Under the federal Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights and the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, victims of sexual assault have some legal guarantees as to how a report of a sexual crime must be handled by a college or university administrator and/or hearing process. If these standards are not met, a …

A state analysis of 446 rape and sexual assaults on college campuses in Massachusetts during the past decade found that female college students represented 97 percent of those victimized. Of those victims, 70 percent of these victims were attacked by a male acquaintance, friend or date. The September 2012 report, titled “Analysis of College Campus Rape and Sexual Assault Reports” …